ClSt / ComL 200:
Notes and Supplements: Monday, April 15

Anthropology and Structuralism

Introduction

The universalizing ideas of Freud and Jung beg many important questions
about the nature
of myth. Freud in particular expressed himself in terms of canonical
Western European
culture. For him Sophocles’ rendition of the Oedipus myth was a timeless
expression of a
trascendent truth, an insight into the human condition that was
applicable to all cultures.
Not that he neglected to allow for variations; indeed, his comments on
the Oedipus myth in
The Interpretation of Dreams illustrtate his belief that the
motif occurs in a
wide variety of disguised forms. Nevertheless, it is his opinion that the
form of the myth
familiar to the Greeks and dramatized by Sophocles reveals the reason for
its power and
universality, dealing openly as it does with feelings of violence and
aggression towards the
father and of erotic longing for the mother that Freud regarded as
universal elements of
every child’s experience.

For Jung, the pattern represented by the Oedipus story was only one
important pattern
among the many that inform human experience. Understanding that the
“universality” of
the “Oedipus complex” really applies only to male experience, he posited
an “Electra
complex” as a complementary female version, basing himself on the
behavior of Electra in
Aeschylus’ Oresteia, who shuns marriage after the murder of
her father
Agamemnon and helps her brother Orestes to avenge the murder upon their
mother
Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus. Recognizing that Freud and,
especially, Freud’s
followers put too much emphasis on the Oedipus myth alone, Jung posited
the existence of
many patterms, which he called “achetypes,” within the “collective
unconscious” of all
people. Besides recognizing the inability of the Oedipal archetype to
account for female
experience, he also understood that ancient Greek culture was only one
among many world
cultures, and should not be regarded as the unique repository of all the
archetypes that
might exist within the collective unconscious. This led Jung to look
especially to the
classical civilizations of Asia in his effort to describe a universal
mythology of the human
psyche.

The Beginnings of Cultural Anthropology

At about the same time that Freud and Jung were at work, the field of
cultural anthropology
was beginning to make an impression on the study of mythology. One of the
tasks the
anthropologists set themselves was to collect mythological material from
a variety of world
cultures and, using compara
tive methods, to attempt to find in it some common basis. In this
case, the goal not to
explain the similarities among world mythologies in historical terms, as
if all cultures were
ultimately descended from one ancestor, but rather to suggest that the
world’s different
cultures developed mythologies in response to basically similar
experiences (those of birth,
death, reproduction, etc.) that were taken as collectively defining the
human condition.

One of the most important products of this movement is Sir James Frazer’s
monumental
study The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion.
Frazer collects an
immense amount of information from a wide variety of world cultures,
including those of
ancient Greece and Rome, and attempts to correlate it in order to answer
certain basic
questions about the nature of primitive religious belief.

In order to compare material that is on the surface so diverse requires
that it be translated
into a more abstract language. Thus Frazer treats the myth of Dionysus,
for example, by
focussing on certain key motifs. “The god Dionysus,” he writes,

is best known to us as a personification of the vine and of the
exhileration produced by the
juice of the grape. His ecstatic worship, characterized by wild dances,
thrilling music, and
tipsy excess, appears to have originated among the rude tribes of Thrace,
who were
notoriously addicted to drunkenness. Its mystic doctrines and extravagent
rites were
essentially foreign to the clear intelligence and sober temperament of
the Greek race. Yet
appealing as it did to that love of mystery and that proneness | to
revert to savagery which
seems to be innate in most men, the religion spread like wildfire through
Greece until the
god whom Homer hardly deigned to notice had become the most popular
figure of the
pantheon. [pp. 386-87 of the abridged edition]

Frazer goes on to observe that Dionysus was regarded not only as a god of
the vine, but a
god of trees in general, and “was believed to have died a violent death,
but to have been
brought to life again” (p. 388). He is able to compare Dionysus on these
terms with other
gods (like the Egyptian Osiris, the Phrygian Attis, and the Syrian
Adonis) and heroes (the
Greek Hippolytus and the Roman Virbius) whose stories feature similar
motifs. In this way
he develops a theory that derives the human religious impulse from wonder
at the natural
process of annual, cyclic vegetation.

Structuralism

The tendency towards abstraction in the interpretation of myth, which is
represented in
different ways by Freud, Jung, and Frazer, reaches its zenith in the
Structuralist
movement. In his article on the structural study of myth, Claude
Levi-Strauss explains in
detail how structuralist analysis works, citing as illustrations first
the Oedipus myth, then a
variety of similar Native American myths.

Like students of comparative religion, the Structuralists take their main
inspiration from
linguistic research; but the source of their inspiration and the goal of
their inquiry differ
from those of the comparatists. Comparative linguistics accounts for
differences among the
world’s languages by positing their descent from a common ancestor.
Originally it was felt
that this linguistic ancestor might be a more transparent medium of
communication than the
various, mutually incomprehensible languages descended from it. That is
to say, it was
hoped that the relationship between the sounds of the original language
and the things to
which these sounds referred might be intuitively obvious. With the
reconstruction of Proto-
Indo-European this proved not to be the case. As a result, the Swiss
linguist Ferdinand de
Saussure developed a new theory of language positing that meaning resides
not in the
actual sounds that are common to all languages, but in the relationships
between those
sounds, relationships that take on different meanings in each language.
For example, the
sounds represented by the letters p-a-i-n are similar in English
and French, but
have very different meanings (“pain” and “bread”, respectively). And the
English
homonyms “pain” and “pane” also possess different meanings, which are
attached to the
sound of the words only by convention, not by any intrinsic relationship.
When this idea is
applied to the study of myth, the hypothesis becomes one in which meaning
is not found in
any specific motif, such as the incest motif in the Oedipus myth, but
rather in the
relationship between the various motifs that make up the myth--as, for
example, in the
relationship between the motif of killing the father and solving the
riddle of the Sphinx.

The question therefore becomes one of how to analyze properly the
structural relationship
that is thought to exist among the various motifs contained within a
single myth.
Levi-Strauss makes several key points, some of them explicit, others
implicit:

The meaning of a myth inheres not in its particular details, but
in the relationships
among them.

A myth must be studied in its totality.

A myth can be adequately represented not by any single, most
authentic rendition,
but only by a complete collection of all relevant renditions.

The universality of myth relates not to the prevalence of specific
motifs, but to the
recurrence in different cultures of similar structural relationships
between different
motifs.